After 20 months of conflict, thousands of Kurds have fled their homes in Syria seeking shelter in the neighboring Autonomous Region Iraqi Kurdistan at Domiz refugee camp near Dohuk, Iraq on Dec. 10, 2012.

Tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds have fled their country’s brutal and increasingly sectarian civil war for refuge across the border in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. The conditions at the Domiz camp may be squalid, but many of the Kurdish refugees have found new hope—having left a fractured nation—in the elusive promise of a new home.